The Art of Being Happy: In a Series of Letters from a Father to His Children: with Observations and CommentsDroz, Joseph
Philosophy
The Art of Being Happy: In a Series of Letters from a Father to His Children: with Observations and Comments
Droz, Joseph
Happiness
These illustrations of the importance of uniting moral with
physical ideas, in regard to vision, landscape, painting and music,
are as true, as they are eloquent and striking. Who has not had
the vivid remembrance of home recalled in a distant land, by a
tree, a feature in the landscape, a blue hill in the distance!
How readily the shadowy images of memory are evoked! Every one is
acquainted with the touching circumstance in the character of
the Swiss soldiers serving in foreign countries. Great numbers of
them used to serve, as stipendaries, in the French armies. It was
forbidden to play, in their presence, the air _Ranz des vaches_.
Homesickness and desertion scarcely failed to ensue from hearing
it. The wild and plaintive air reminded them of ‘Sweet home,’
their mountains, their simple pleasures, and the range and lowing
of their kine. The beautiful Scotch airs derive their charm from
their association with mountain scenery, and the peculiar history
and manners of a highly sensitive, intelligent and national
people. The same may be said of the unrivalled _Erin go Bragh_, in
relation to the Irish; in a word of the national music of every
people. Associate any idea with sentiment and the heart, and it
becomes touching, and sublime, and capable of stirring the deepest
fountains of feeling, according to the remembrance with which it is
allied.
Note 40, page 136.
I have heard persons, endowed with keen feelings, repiningly
contrast the miseries which they endured from an excess of
irritable and unregulated sensibility, with the apparently joyous
apathy of fat and fortunate burghers, who seem to find no sorrows
and no troubles in life, and who hear with incredulity and, in
fact, with an entire want of comprehension, about sufferings
resulting from witnessing misery, which we have no means of
relieving, and the sorrows, from innumerable sources, to which
those of a keenly sensitive nature are subject. I have never seen
these contrasts of character in this light. I unhesitatingly
believe that a righteous Providence has exactly and admirably
adjusted the weights in either scale. The great mass, who are not
disturbed with excess of feeling, are, from the same temperament,
interdicted from a whole universe of enjoyments, into which those,
who possess sensibility, and regulate it aright, have free access.
Note 41, page 137.
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